Children have been used in vaccine research since its very beginning, usually said to have been in 1796, when Edward Jenner inoculated 8-year-old James Phipps with cowpox, and then challenged young James with actual smallpox (1). However, earlier, in 1789, Jenner inoculated his own 10-month-old son, Edward Jr., with swinepox. Edward Jr. then came down with a pox disease, which he fortunately recovered from. His father then challenged him with smallpox.

Edward Jr. survived his exposure to smallpox. But, since Edward Sr. wanted to determine the duration of young Edward’s protection, he again challenged his son with smallpox in 1791, when the boy was two. Edward Sr. inoculated his son yet again with smallpox when the boy was three. Fortunately, young Edward was resistant to each of the smallpox challenges his father subjected him to.

Jenner used several other young children in his experiments, including his second son, Robert, who was 11-months-old at the time. One of the children in Jenner’s experiments died from a fever; possibly caused by a microbial contaminant in an inoculum. [Microbes were not known in the late 18th century.]

We have no record of how Jenner (or his wife) felt about his use of his own children. However, there is reason to believe that Jenner felt some remorse over his use of James Phipps, who he referred to as “poor James.” Jenner looked after Phipps in later years, eventually building a cottage for him; even planting flowers in front of it himself.

By the 20th century, some of the most esteemed medical researchers were using children—in institutions for the mentally deficient—to test new drugs, vaccines, and even surgical procedures. These institutions were typically underfunded and understaffed. Several of them were cited for neglecting and abusing their residents. Moreover, their young patients were usually from poor families, or were orphans, or were abandoned. Thus, many of the children had no one to look out for their interests. In addition, research at these institutions was hidden from the public. [The goings-on at these institutions were, in general, hidden from the public, and most of the public likely preferred it that way.] Federal regulations that might have protected the children were not yet in existence, and federal approval was not even required to test vaccines and drugs.

In the early 1940s, Werner Henle, of the University of Pennsylvania, used children at Pennhurst—a Pennsylvania facility for the mentally deficient—in his research to develop an influenza vaccine. [Pennhurst was eventually infamous for its inadequate staffing, and for neglecting and abusing its patients (2). It was closed in 1987, after two decades of federal legal actions.] Henle would inoculate his subjects with the vaccine, and then expose them to influenza, using an oxygen mask fitted to their faces.

Pennhurst, a state-funded Pennsylvania facility for the mentally deficient, was one of the most shameful examples of the neglect and mistreatment that was common at these institutions. It was the site of Werner Henle’s research in the 1940s to develop an influenza vaccine.

Henle’s vaccine did not protect all of his subjects. Moreover, it frequently caused side effects. Additionally, Henle maintained (correctly?) that a proper test of a vaccine must include a control group (i.e., a group exposed to the virus, but not to the vaccine). Thus, he deliberately exposed unvaccinated children to influenza. Children who contracted influenza had fevers as high as 104o F, as well as typical flu-like aches and pains.

Despite Henle’s investigations at Pennhuerst, he was a highly renowned virologist, best known for his later research on Epstein Barr virus. See Aside 1.

[Aside 1: While Henle was researching his influenza vaccine at Pennhurst, Jonas Salk concurrently worked on an influenza vaccine, using adult residents (ranging in age from 20 to 70 years) at the Ypsilanti State School in Michigan.]

Next, consider Hilary Koprowski, an early competitor of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin in the race to develop a polio vaccine (3). By 1950, Koprowski was ready to test his live polio vaccine in people. [That was four years before Sabin would be ready to do the same with his live polio vaccine.] Koprowski had already found that his vaccine protected chimpanzees against polio virus. And, he also tested his vaccine on himself. Since neither he nor the chimpanzees suffered any ill effects, Koprowski proceeded to test his vaccine on 20 children at Letchworth Village for mentally disabled children, in Rockland County, NY. [Like Pennhurst, Letchworth Village too was cited for inadequately caring for its residents.] Seventeen of Koprowski’s inoculated children developed antibodies to the virus, and none developed complications.

Koprowski did not initiate his association with Letchworth. Actually, Letchworth administrators, fearing an outbreak of polio at the facility, approached Koprowski, requesting that he vaccinate the children. Koprowski gave each child “a tablespoon of infectious material” in half a glass of chocolate milk (4). Koprowski never deliberately infected the Letchworth children with virulent virus.

Koprowski reported the results of his Letchworth studies at a 1951 conference of major polio researchers, attended by both Salk and Sabin. When Koprowski announced that he actually had tested a live vaccine in children, many conferees were stunned, even horrified. Sabin shouted out: “Why did you do it? Why? Why (4)?” See Aside 2.

[Aside 2: In the 1930s, Canadian scientist Maurice Brodie tested a killed polio vaccine in twelve children, who supposedly had been “volunteered by their parents (4).” For a short time Brodie was hailed as a hero. However, too little was known at the time for Brodie to ensure that his formaldehyde treatment had sufficiently inactivated the live polio virus. Consequently, Brodie’s vaccine actually caused polio in several of the children. After this incident, most polio researchers could not conceive of ever again testing a polio vaccine, much less a live one, in children.]

Neither Koprowski nor Letchworth Village administrators notified New York State officials about the tests. Approval from the state would seem to have been required, since Koprowski later admitted that he was certain he would have been turned down. And, it is not clear whether Koprowski or the school ever got consent from the parents to use their children. However, recall there were not yet any federal regulations that required them to do so.

Koprowski was untroubled by the uproar over his use of the Letchworth children, arguing that his experiments were necessary. Yet he later acknowledged: “if we did such a thing now we’d be put on jail…” But, he added, “If Jenner or Pasteur or Theiler (see Aside 2) or myself had to repeat and test our discoveries [today], there would be no smallpox vaccine, no rabies vaccine, no yellow fever vaccine, and no live oral polio vaccine.” Moreover, he maintained that, secret or not, his use of the Letchworth children fit well within the boundaries of accepted scientific practice.

[Aside 2: Nobel laureate Max Theiler developed a vaccine against yellow fever in 1937; the first successful live vaccine of any kind (5). Theiler formulated a test for the efficacy of his vaccine, which did not involve exposing humans to virulent virus. Sera from vaccinated human subjects were injected into mice, which were then challenged with the Yellow Fever virus.]

Koprowski referred to the Letchworth children as “volunteers (6).” This prompted the British journal The Lancet to write: “One of the reasons for the richness of the English language is that the meaning of some words is continually changing. Such a word is “volunteer.” We may yet read in a scientific journal that an experiment was carried out with twenty volunteer mice, and that twenty other mice volunteered as controls.” See Aside 3.

[Aside 3: Koprowski was a relatively unknown scientist when he carried out his polio research at Letchworth. He later became a renowned virologist, having overseen the development of a rabies vaccine that is still used today, and having pioneered the use of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. Yet, he is best remembered for developing the world’s first effective polio vaccine; several years before Salk and Sabin brought out their vaccines.

Most readers of the blog are aware that the Salk and Sabin vaccines are credited with having made the world virtually polio-free. What then became of Koprowski’s vaccine? Although it was used on four continents, it was never licensed in the United States. A small field trial of Koprowski’s vaccine in 1956, in Belfast, showed that its attenuated virus could revert to a virulent form after inoculation into humans. Yet a 1958 test, in nearly a quarter million people in the Belgian Congo, showed that the vaccine was safe and effective. Regardless, the vaccine’s fate was sealed in 1960, when the U.S. Surgeon General rejected it on safety grounds, while approving the safer Sabin vaccine. Personalities and politics may well have played a role in that decision (3, 4).

Interestingly, Sabin developed his vaccine from a partially attenuated polio virus stock that he received from Koprowski. It happened as follows. In the early 1950s, when Koprowski’s polio research was further along than Sabin’s, Sabin approached Koprowski with the suggestion that they might exchange virus samples. Koprowski generously sent Sabin his samples, but Sabin never reciprocated.

Koprowski liked to say: “I introduce myself as the developer of the Sabin poliomyelitis vaccine (7).” He and Sabin had a sometimes heated adversarial relationship during the time when their vaccines were in competition. But they later became friends.]

Sabin was at last ready to test his polio vaccine in people during the winter of 1954-1955. Thirty adult prisoners, at a federal prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, were the subjects for that first test in humans. [The use of prisoners also raises ethical concerns.]

Recall Sabin’s public outcry in 1951 when Koprowski announced that he used institutionalized children to test his polio vaccine. In 1954, Sabin sought permission to do the very same himself; asserting to New York state officials: “Mentally defective children, who are under constant observation in an institution over long periods of time, offer the best opportunity for the careful and prolonged follow-up studies…”

Although Sabin had already tested his attenuated viruses in adult humans (prisoners), as well as in monkeys and chimpanzees, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which funded polio research in the pre-NIH days of the 1950s, blocked his proposal to use institutionalized children. Thus, Sabin again used adult prisoners at the federal prison in Ohio. With the concurrence of prison officials, virtually every inmate over 21 years-old “volunteered,” in exchange for $25 each, and a possible reduction in sentence. None of the prisoners in the study became ill, while all developed antibodies against polio virus.

Testing in children was still a necessary step before a polio vaccine could be administered to children on a widespread basis. But, Sabin’s vaccine could not be tested in children in the United States. Millions of American children had already received the killed Salk vaccine, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was not about to support another massive field trial of a vaccine, in children, in the United States (3).

Then, in 1959, after a succession of improbable events, 10 million children in the Soviet Union were vaccinated with Sabin’s vaccine (3). The Soviets were so pleased with the results of that massive trial that they next vaccinated all seventy-seven million Soviet citizens under 20 years-of-age with the Sabin vaccine. That figure vastly exceeded the number of individuals in the United States, who were vaccinated with the rival Salk vaccine during its field trials.

Next up, we have Nobel laureate John Enders who, in the 1950’s, oversaw the development of the first measles vaccine. Enders and co-workers carried out several trials of their attenuated measles vaccine; first in monkeys and then in themselves. Since the vaccine induced an increase in measles antibody titers, while causing no ill effects, they next tested it in severely handicapped children at the Walter E. Fernald State School near Waltham, Massachusetts.

Enders seemed somewhat more sensitive than either Henle or Koprowski to the ethics of using institutionalized children. Samuel L. Katz, the physician on Enders’ team, personally explained the trial to every Fernald parent, and no child was given the vaccine without written parental consent. [Federal guidelines requiring that step still did not exist.] Also, no child was deliberately infected with virulent measles virus.

Katz personally examined each of the inoculated Fernald children every day. None of these children produced measles virus, while all of them developed elevated levels of anti-measles antibodies. Also, the Fernald School had been experiencing severe measles outbreaks before the Enders team vaccinated any of its children. But, when the next measles outbreak struck the school, all of the vaccinated children were totally protected.

In 1963, the Enders vaccine became the first measles vaccine to be licensed in the United States. Several years later it was further attenuated by Maurice Hilleman (8) and colleagues at Merck. In 1971, it was incorporated into the Merck MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine. See Aside 4.

[Aside 4: Before Enders carried out his measles investigations he pioneered the growth of viruses in tissue culture. In 1949, Enders, and collaborators Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, showed that poliovirus could be cultivated in the laboratory. This development was crucial, allowing Salk and Sabin to grow a virtually unlimited amount of polio virus and, consequently, to develop their polio vaccines. In 1954, Enders, Weller, and Robbins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their polio virus work.]

It may surprise some readers that before the mid 1960s the so-called Nuremburg Code of 1947 comprised the only internationally recognized ethical guidelines for experimentation on human subjects. The Nuremburg Code was drawn up by an American military tribunal during the trial of 23 Nazi physicians and scientists for atrocities they committed while carrying out so-called “medical” experiments during World War II. [Sixteen of the 23 Nazis on trial at Nuremburg were convicted, and 7 of these were executed (see Note 1)].

The Nuremberg Code’s Directives for Human Experimentation contained strongly stated guidelines. Its tenets included the need to obtain informed consent (interpreted by some to prohibit research using children), the need to minimize the risks to human subjects, and the need to insure that any risks are offset by potential benefits to society.

But, despite the well-articulated principles of the Nuremberg Code, it had little effect on research conduct in the United States. Federal rules, with the authority to regulate research conduct, would be needed for that. So, how did our current federal oversight of research come to be?

A 1996 paper in the The New England Journal of Medicine, “Ethics and Clinical Research,” by physician Henry Beecher, brought to the fore the need for rules to protect human subjects in biomedical research (9). Beecher was roused to write the paper in part by the early 1960s experiments of Saul Krugman, an infectious disease expert at NYU. Krugman used mentally deficient children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York, to show that hepatitis A and hepatitis B are distinct diseases (9). Also, before a hepatitis vaccine was available, Krugman inoculated the children with serum from convalescing individuals, to ask whether that serum might protect the children against hepatitis. Krugman exposed the children to live virus either by injection, or via milkshakes seeded with feces from children with hepatitis.

Krugman found that convalescent sera indeed conferred passive immunity to hepatitis. Next, he discovered that by infecting passively protected patients with live hepatitis virus he could produce active immunity. Krugman had, in fact, developed the world’s first vaccine against hepatitis B virus (HBV) (see Aside 4). [Although Krugman used mentally deficient institutionalized children in his experiments, his investigations were nonetheless funded in part by a federal agency; the Armed Forces Epidemiology Section of the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office.]

[Aside 4: The first hepatitis B vaccine licensed for widespread use was developed at Merck, based on principles put forward by Nobel Laureate Baruch Blumberg, (10).]

Beecher was particularly troubled by two aspects of Krugman’s experiments. First, Krugman infected healthy children with live virulent virus. Beecher maintained that it is morally unacceptable to deliberately infect any individual with an infectious agent, irrespective of the potential benefits to society. [See reference 11 for an alternative view. “The ethical issue is the harm done by the infection, not the mere fact of infection itself.”]

Second, Beecher charged that the Willowbrook School’s administrators coerced parents into allowing their children to be used in Krugman’s research. The circumstances were as follows. Because of overcrowding at the school, Willowbrook administrators closed admission via the usual route. However, space was still available in a separate hepatitis research building, thereby enabling admission of additional children who might be used in the research.

Were the Willowbrook parents coerced into allowing their children to be used in the research there? Consider that the parents were poor and in desperate need of a means of providing care for their mentally impaired children. Making admission of the children contingent on allowing them to be used in the research might well be viewed as coercion. Yet even today, with federal guidelines now in place to protect human subjects, institutions such as the NIH Clinical Center admit patients who agree to participate in research programs. Is that coercion?

Beecher’s 1966 paper cited a total of 22 instances of medical research that Beecher claimed were unethical (9). Four examples involved research using children. Krugman’s work at Willowbrook was the only one of these four examples that involved vaccine research. Beecher’s other examples involved research using pregnant women, fetuses, and prisoners. But it was Beecher’s condemnation of Krugman’s hepatitis research at Willowbrook that is mainly credited with stirring debate over the ethics of using children in research.

Did Krugman deserve Beecher’s condemnation? Before Krugman began his investigations at Willowbrook, he plainly laid out his intentions in a 1958 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (12). Importantly, Krugman listed a number of ethical considerations, which show that he did not undertake his Willowbrook investigations lightly. In fact, Krugman’s ethical considerations, together with his plans to minimize risks to the children, were not unlike the assurances one might now submit to an institutional review board (11).

Many (but not all) knowledgeable biomedical researchers claimed that Beecher misunderstood Krugman’s research and, thus, unjustly vilified him. Krugman was never officially censored for his Willowbrook investigations. Moreover, condemnation of Krugman did not prevent his election in 1972 to the presidency of the American Pediatric Society, or to his 1983 Lasker Public Service Award.

To Beecher’s credit, his 1966 paper was instrumental in raising awareness of the need to regulate research using human subjects. Beecher was especially concerned with the protection of children and, apropos that, the nature of informed consent.

In 1974, the National Research Act was signed into law, creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The basic ethical principles identified by the Commission are summarized in its so-called Belmont Report, issued in 1978. Its tenets include minimizing harm to all patients, and the need to especially protect those with “diminished autonomy” or who are incapable of “self-determination.” In addition, federal guidelines now require universities and other research institutions to have Institutional Review Boards to protect human subjects of biomedical research. [Reference 13 (available on line) contains a detailed history of the establishment of these policies.] See Aside 6.

[Aside 6: The infamous U.S. Public Health Service Tuskegee syphilis research program, conducted between 1932 and 1972, in which several hundred impoverished black men were improperly advised and never given appropriate treatment for their syphilis, also raised public awareness of the need to protect human subjects. More recently, research involving embryonic stem cells and fetuses has stoked an ongoing and heated public debate. Policies regarding this research are still not settled, with stem-cell research being legal in some states, and a crime in others. Other recent technological advances, such as DNA identification and shared databases, have been raising new concerns, such as the need to protect patient privacy. In response to these new developments, in June 2016, the US National Academies of Sciences,Engineering and Medicine released a report proposing new rules (indeed a complete overhaul of the 1978 Belmont Report) to deal with these circumstances. The Academy’s report has stirred debate in the biomedical community]

Note 1: The use of children in medical research makes many of us profoundly uneasy. We may be particularly troubled by accounts of the exploitation of institutionalized children, who comprised a uniquely defenseless part of society. Indeed, it was the very vulnerability of those children that made it possible for them to be exploited by researchers. Consequently, some readers may well be asking whether the activities of vaccine researchers Krugman, Koprowski, Sabin, Henle and others might have been comparable to that of the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. So, I offer this cautionary interjection. While in no way condoning the vaccine researchers using institutionalized children, their work was carried out for the sole purpose of saving human lives. As Koprowski suggested above, if not for that work, we might not have vaccines against smallpox, rabies, yellow fever, and polio. Now, consider Josef Mengele, a Nazi medical officer at Auschwitz, and the most infamous of the Nazi physicians. [Mengele was discussed several times at Nuremberg, but was never actually tried. Allied forces were convinced at the time that he was dead, but he had escaped to South America.] At Auschwitz, Mengele conducted germ warfare “research” in which he would infect one twin with a disease such as typhus, and then transfuse that twin’s blood into the other twin. The first twin would be allowed to die, while the second twin would be killed so that the organs of the two children might then be compared. Mengele reputedly killed fourteen twin children in a single night via a chloroform injection to the heart. Moreover, he unnecessarily amputated limbs and he experimented on pregnant women before sending them to the Auschwitz gas chambers.

References:

Edward Jenner and the Smallpox Vaccine, Posted on the blog September 16, 2014.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV), one of mankind’s most important pathogens, infects about 2 billion people worldwide, and more than 500 million individuals are life-long carriers of the virus; with most in Asia. HBV causes acute and chronic cirrhosis, as well as hepatocellular carcinoma. In point of fact, HBV is the 10th leading cause of death in the world! The serendipitous discovery of HBV, and the development of the first HBV vaccine, happened as follows. [See Note 1 for a brief review of the remarkable HBV replication strategy].

In the early 1940’s, during World War II, British doctor, F. O. MacCallum, was the first to suggest that an infectious agent might cause hepatitis. MacCallum was assigned to produce a yellow fever vaccine for British soldiers. That was how he happened to notice that soldiers tended to come down with hepatitis a few months after receiving the yellow fever vaccine.

It was fortunate that MacCallum also knew of hepatitis cases in children who received inoculations of serum from patients convalescing from measles and mumps (a means of protection against those viruses before vaccines were available), and of hepatitis cases in blood transfusion recipients, and of cases following treatments with unsterilized reused syringes.

To explain these coincidences, MacCallum hypothesized that hepatitis might be transmitted by a factor in human blood. And, since hepatitis could be transmitted by inoculation with serum that had been filtered, MacCallum proposed that the hepatitis factor might be a virus. [In 1947 MacCallum reported that hepatitis could be spread by food and water that had been contaminated with fecal material, as well as by blood. He coined the term hepatitis A for the form of the disease spread by food and water, and hepatitis B for the form transmitted via blood.] See Aside 1.

[Aside 1: The following episode, described in MacCallum’s own words (1), occurred in England during World War II: “One day in 1942, I received a message to go to Whitehall to see one of the senior medical advisers and when I arrived I was asked ‘What is this yellow fever vaccine and how dangerous is it?’ After explaining its constitution and the possibility of a mild reaction four to five days after inoculation, I was told that the Cabinet was at that moment debating whether or not Mr. Churchill should be allowed to go to Moscow, which he wished to do in a few days’ time. The yellow fever vaccine was theoretically essential before he could fly through the Middle East, but I explained that no antibody would be produced before seven to ten days so that there would be little point in giving the vaccine. It was finally decided that the vaccine would not be used, and the administrators would take care of the situation. Several months later I received an irate call from the Director of Medical Services of the RAF, who had been inoculated with the same batch of vaccine which would have been used for Mr. Churchill, and was informed that the D. G. had spent a very mouldy Christmas with hepatitis about 66 days after his inoculation…I will leave it to you to speculate on what might possibly have been the effect on the liver of our most famous statesman and our ultimate fate if he had received the icterogenic vaccine.”]

With the advent of cell culture in the 1950s, researchers hoped that a hepatitis agent might soon be cultivated in vitro. Nonetheless, HBV was not discovered until 1966. What’s more, the discovery did not involve growing the virus in cell culture. And, reminiscent of the case of MacCallum above, the discovery was made by a researcher, Baruch S. Blumberg, who was not even working on hepatitis. Rather, Blumberg was interested in why individuals varied in their susceptibilities to various illnesses.

Nobel Laureate Baruch Blumberg

Blumberg sought to answer that question by identifying possibly relevant genetic differences between population groups, which, in the pre-molecular biology era, might be revealed by differences in their blood proteins. Thus, in the early 1950s, Blumberg, then working at the NIH, began collecting a panel of blood samples from diverse populations throughout the world.

Blumberg looked for serum protein variations (i.e., serum protein polymorphisms) by asking if sera from multiply-transfused individuals (defined by Blumberg as persons who received 25 units of blood or more) might contain antibodies that reacted with proteins in the serum samples of his panel. His rational, in his own words, was as follows: “We decided to test the hypothesis that patients who received large numbers of transfusions might develop antibodies against one or more of the polymorphic serum proteins (either known or unknown) which they themselves had not inherited, but which the blood donors had (2).” In other words, patients who received multiple transfusions were more likely than others to have antibodies against polymorphic serum proteins in donor blood, and those antibodies might also react with polymorphic serum proteins in the samples from his panel. See Aside 2.

[Aside 2: Blumberg used the Ouchterlony double-diffusion agar gel technique in these experiments. Serum samples to be tested against each other were placed in opposite wells of a gel. The proteins they contained could then diffuse through the gel. Antigen-antibody complexes that formed between the two samples appeared as white lines in the gel.]

Hemophilia and leukemia patients were well-represented in Blumberg’s collection of serum samples from multiply-transfused individuals. And, a serendipitous aspect of Blumberg’s experimental approach was that he used these samples to probe for serum protein polymorphisms in samples from geographically diverse populations. Thus it happened that Blumberg detected a cross-reaction between a New York hemophilia patient’s serum and a serum sample from an Australian aborigine. But what could these two individuals have had in common that might have triggered the cross-reaction?

His curiosity thus aroused, Blumberg and collaborator, Harvey Alter, of the NIH Blood Bank, tested the hemophilia patient’s serum against thousands of other serum samples. Blumberg and Alter may have been surprised to find that whatever the antigen in the Aborigine’s serum was that reacted with the hemophilia patient’s serum, reactivity against that antigen was common (one in ten) in leukemia patients, but rare (one in 1,000) in normal individuals. In any case, because the antigen was first identified in an Australian aborigine, it was termed the Australia antigen.

Bear in mind that Blumberg’s original purpose was to explain why individuals differed in their susceptibilities to various illnesses. Thus, Blumberg at first believed that he detected an inherited blood-protein that predisposes people to leukemia. However, additional experiments showed that the antigen was more common in older individuals than in younger ones; a finding more consistent with the possibility that the antigen might be associated with an infectious agent.

Blumberg’s first clue that the Australia antigen might be associated with hepatitis came to light when he tested serum samples from a 12-year old boy with Down syndrome. The first time that the boy was tested for the Australia antigen, he was negative. However, several months later, when retested, the boy was positive. Moreover, sometime during that interim, the boy also developed hepatitis.

Blumberg, and other researchers, carried out additional experiments, which confirmed that the Australia antigen indeed associated with hepatitis. In addition, the antigen was more frequently detected in hepatitis sufferers than in individuals with other liver diseases. Thus, the Australia antigen was a marker of hepatitis in particular and not of liver pathology in general. See Aside 3.

[Aside 3: Blumberg had a personal reason motivating him to identify the cause of hepatitis. His technician (later Dr. Barbara Werner) became ill with hepatitis, which she almost certainly acquired in the laboratory. Fortunately, she underwent a complete recovery.]

In 1970, British pathologist David Dane and colleagues at Middlesex Hospital in London, and K. E. Anderson and colleagues in New York, provided corroborating evidence that hepatitis is an infectious disease. Using electron microscopy, they observed 42-nm “virus-like particles” in the sera of patients who were positive for the Australia antigen. In addition, they saw these same particles in liver cells of patients with hepatitis.

What then is the Australia antigen? Actually, it is the surface protein of the 42-nm HBV particles; now known as the hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg). Since HBV particles per se were described for the first time by David Dane, they are sometimes referred to as Dane particles.

Now we can explain Blumberg’s early finding, that individuals who received multiple transfusions (e.g., leukemia and hemophilia patients) were more likely than the general population to have antibodies against the Australia antigen. Those individuals were more likely than the general population to have received donated blood and, thus, were more likely to have been recipients of blood contaminated with HBV. At that time, a large percentage of the blood supply came from paid donors, at least some of whom were syringe-sharing, intravenous drug abusers and, consequently, more likely than most to be HBV carriers. In 1972 it became law in the United States that all donated blood be screened for HBV. See Note 2.

But it was important to protect all people from HBV; not just transfusion recipients. In 1968, Blumberg, now at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and collaborator Irving Millman, hypothesized that HBsAg might provoke an immune response that would protect people against HBV and, consequently, that a vaccine could be made using HBsAg purified from the blood of HBV carriers. In Blumberg’s own words: “Irving Millman and I applied separation techniques for isolating and purifying the surface antigen and proposed using this material as a vaccine. To our knowledge, this was a unique approach to the production of a vaccine; that is, obtaining the immunizing antigen directly from the blood of human carriers of the virus (1).” The Fox Chase Cancer Center filed a patent for the process in 1969.

Blumberg was willing to share his method and the patent with any pharmaceutical company willing to develop an HBV vaccine for widespread use. Nonetheless, the scientific establishment was somewhat slow to accept his experimental findings and his proposal for making the vaccine. Then, in 1971, Merck accepted a license from Fox Chase to develop the vaccine. In 1982, after more years of research and testing, Maurice Hillman (3) and colleagues at Merck turned out the first commercial HBV vaccine (“Heptavax”). Producing an HBV vaccine, without having to cultivate the virus in vitro, was considered one of the major medical achievements of the day. See Notes 3 and 4.

The consequences of Blumberg’s vaccine were immediate and striking. For instance, in China the rate of chronic HBV infection among children fell from 15% to around 1% in less than a decade. And, in the United States, and in many other countries, post-transfusion hepatitis B was nearly eradicated.

Moreover, Blumberg’s HBV vaccine was, in a real sense, the world’s first anti-cancer vaccine since it prevented HBV-induced hepatocellular carcinoma, which accounts for 80% of all liver cancer; the 9th leading cause of death. Jonathan Chernoff (the scientific director of the Fox Chase Cancer Center, where Blumberg spent most of his professional life) stated: “I think it’s fair to say that Barry (Blumberg) prevented more cancer deaths than any person who’s ever lived (4).”

In 1976 Blumberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.” He shared the award with Carlton Gajdusek, who won his portion for discoveries regarding the epidemiology of kuru (5). See Note 5.

Blumberg claimed that saving lives was the whole point of his career. “This is what drew me to medicine. There is, in Jewish thought, this idea that if you save a single life, you save the whole world, and that affected me (7).” See Aside 4.

[Aside 4: Blumberg received his elementary school education at an orthodox yeshiva in Brooklyn, and he attended weekly Talmud discussion classes until his death. Interestingly, Blumberg graduated from Far Rockaway High School in Queens, N.Y.; also the alma mater of fellow Nobel laureates, physicists Burton Richter and Richard Feynman.]

As we’ve seen, Blumberg’s landmark discovery of HBV sprang from a basic study of human genetic polymorphisms. In Blumberg’s own words, “… it is clear that I could not have planned the investigation at its beginning to find the cause of hepatitis B. This experience does not encourage an approach to basic research which is based exclusively on specific-goal-directed programs for the solution of biological problems (1).”

Saul Krugman (Note 4) had this to say about Blumberg’s discovery: “It is well known that Blumberg’s study that led to the discovery of Australia antigen was not designed to discover the causative agent of type B hepatitis. If he had included this objective in his grant application, the study section would have considered him either naïve or out of his mind. Yet the chance inclusion of one serum specimen from an Australian aborigine in a panel of 24 sera that was used in his study of polymorphisms in serum proteins…led to detection of an antigen that subsequently proved to be the hepatitis B surface antigen (1).” See Note 6.

In 1999, Blumberg’s scientific career took a rather curious turn when he accepted an appointment by NASA administrator, Dan Goldin, to head the NASA Astrobiology Institute. There, Blumberg helped to establish NASA’s search for extraterrestrial life. Blumberg also served on the board of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

Blumberg passed away on April 5, 2011, at 85 years of age.

Notes:

[Note 1: HBV is the prototype virus for the hepadnavirus family, which displays the most remarkable, and perhaps bizarre, viral replication strategy known. In brief, in the cell nucleus, the cellular RNA polymerase II enzyme transcribes the hepadnavirus circular, double-stranded DNA genome, thereby generating several distinct species of viral RNA transcripts, all of which are exported to the cytoplasm. The largest of these viral transcripts is the pregenomic RNA; a transcript of the entire circular viral DNA genome, as well as an additional terminal redundant sequence. Remarkably, the pregenomic RNA is then packaged in nascent virus capsids, within which it is reverse transcribed by a virus-encoded reverse transcriptase activity, thereby becoming an encapsulated progeny hepadnavirus double-stranded DNA genome. Thus, reverse transcription is a crucial step in the replication cycle of the hepadnaviruses, as it is in the case of the retroviruses. But, while the retroviruses replicate their RNA genomes via a DNA intermediate, the hepadnaviruses replicate their DNA genomes via an RNA intermediate.]

[Note 2: The highly sensitive radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique, developed by Rosalyn Yallow and Solomon Berson, is the basis for the test that screens the blood supply for the Australia antigen. The story behind this assay is worthy of note here because it is yet another example of serendipity in the progress of science. In brief, Yallow and Berson sought to develop an assay to measure insulin levels in diabetics. Towards that end, they happened to find that radioactively-labeled insulin disappeared more slowly from the blood samples of people previously given an injection of insulin than from the blood samples of untreated patients. That observation led them to conclude that the treated patients had earlier generated an insulin-binding antibody. And, from that premise they hit upon the RIA procedure. Using their insulin test as an example, they would add increasing amounts of an unlabelled insulin sample to a known amount of antibody bound to radioactively labeled insulin. They would then measure the amount label displaced from the antibody, from which they could calculate the amount of unlabelled insulin in the test sample. Their procedure has since been applied to hundreds of other substances. RIA is simpler to carry out and also about 1,000-fold more sensitive than the double-diffusion agar gel procedure that Blumberg used to identify the Australia antigen. Yallow and Berson refused to patent their RIA procedure, despite its huge commercial value. Yallow received a share of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her role in its development. Berson, died in 1972 and did not share in the award.]

[Note 3: Making Heptavax directly from the blood of human HBV carriers was somewhat hindered because it required a continuing and uncertain supply of suitable donor blood. Moreover, there was concern that even after purifying the HBsAg, and treating it with formalin to inactivate any infectivity, the vaccine might yet contain other live dangerous viruses. Concern increased in the early 1980s with the emergence of HIV/AIDS, since much of the HBV-infected serum came from donors who later developed AIDS. Thus, in 1990 Heptavax was replaced in the United States by a safer genetically engineered (i.e., DNA recombinant) HBV vaccine, which contained no virus whatsoever. That vaccine was the first to be made using recombinant DNA technology. Moreover, it was yet another instance in which Hilleman played a key role in the development of a vaccine (3).]

[Note 4: In 1971, Saul Krugman, working at NYU, was actually the first researcher to make a “vaccine” against HBV. Krugman’s accomplishment began as a straightforward inquiry into whether heat (boiling) might kill HAV (see Note 5). Finding that it did, Krugman repeated his experiments; this time to determine whether boiling might likewise kill HBV in the serum of HBV carriers. As Krugman expected, boiling indeed destroyed HBV infectivity. But, to his surprise, while the heated serum was no longer infectious, it did induce incomplete, but statistically significant protection against challenge with live HBV. Krugman considers his “vaccine” discovery, like Blumberg’s discovery of HBV, to have resulted from “pure serendipity” (1).

Krugman could not answer whether HBsAg per se in his crude vaccine induced immunity. However, Hilleman, in 1975, using purified HBsAg, as per Blumberg’s concept, showed that HBsAg indeed induced immunity against an intravenous challenge with HBV.

Krugman also carried out key studies on the epidemiology of hepatitis, demonstrating that “infectious” (type A) hepatitis is transmitted by the fecal-oral route, while the more serious “serum” (type B) hepatitis is transmitted by blood and sexual contact.

Krugman reputation was somewhat tarnished because he used institutionalized disabled children as test subjects in the experiments that led to his vaccine. While that practice astonishes us today, it was not unheard-of in the day. In any event, it did not prevent Krugman’s election in 1972 as president of the American Pediatric Society, or his 1983 Lasker Public Service Award.]

[Note 5: Gajdusek’s reputation was later sullied when he was convicted of child molestation (5).]

[Note 6: In 1973 and 1974, research groups led by Stephen Feinstone and Maurice Hilleman (3) discovered hepatitis A virus (HAV), a picornavirus.

After the discoveries of HAV and HBV, it became clear that blood samples cleared of HAV and HBV could still transmit hepatitis. In 1983 Mikhail Balayan identified a virus, now known a hepatitis E virus (the prototype of a new family of RNA viruses), as the cause of a non-A, non-B infectious hepatitis (6).

In 1989, a mysterious non-A, non-B hepatitis agent, now known as hepatitis C virus (a flavivirus), was identified by a team of molecular biologists using the cutting-edge molecular biology techniques of the day (8).]

In the March 27, 2014 posting, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin: One of the Great Rivalries of Medical Science, I wrote the following:

“Several polio hotspots remain in the world. Three major ones are Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. Recent outbreaks have also occurred in Syria and Somalia. In each of these instances, social and political climates make it difficult to carry out eradication campaigns…As recently as March 2014, militants attacked a polio vaccination team in northwest Pakistan, detonating a roadside bomb and then opening fire on their convoy, killing 12 of their security team, and wounding dozens more. Some Pakistani religious leaders denounced the vaccination campaign in Pakistan as a cover for spying …”

The article by Mark Mazzetti in yesterday’s (May 20, 2014) New York Times, entitled: U.S. Cites End to C.I.A. Ruses Using Vaccines, reaffirms that accusations by the Taliban and Pakistani clerics were not simply propaganda or paranoia. Mazzetti’s piece is as follows:

“WASHINGTON — Three years after the Central Intelligence Agency set up a phony hepatitis vaccination program in Pakistan as part of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration told a group of American health educators last week that the agency no longer uses immunization programs as a cover for spying operations.

In a letter to leaders at a dozen schools of public health, President Obama’s senior counterterrorism adviser said the C.I.A. had banned the practice of making “operational use” of vaccination programs, adding that the agency would not seek to “obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs.”

The letter from the adviser, Lisa O. Monaco, comes more than a year after public health officials wrote to Mr. Obama expressing anger that the United States had used immunization programs as a front for espionage. The educators were protesting the C.I.A.’s employment of a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to set up a hepatitis B vaccination program in Abbottabad to gain access to a compound where Bin Laden was believed to be hiding.

“While political and security agendas may by necessity induce collateral damage, we as a society set boundaries on these damages, and we believe this sham vaccination campaign exceeded those damages,” the educators’ letter said.

The intelligence operation failed to determine whether Bin Laden was in the compound. The Qaeda leader was killed shortly afterward, in May 2011, in a nighttime raid carried out by Navy SEALs. Dr. Afridi was arrested days after the raid and remains in jail in Pakistan.

While in custody, Dr. Afridi told interrogators that he was introduced to C.I.A. officers in Pakistan by an employee of Save the Children. Both the C.I.A. and Save the Children have denied the aid group was used for spying, but the revelation led it to close its operations in Pakistan.

Since the C.I.A.’s vaccination program became public, dozens of public health workers in Pakistan have been killed, with militant groups sometimes announcing that the workers had been suspected of being spies.

John O. Brennan, the agency’s director, put the new policy into effect last August, an agency spokesman said. “By publicizing this policy,” said Ned Price, the spokesman, “our objective is to dispel one canard that militant groups have used as justification for cowardly attacks against vaccination providers.”

The earlier article, by Saeed Shah, in the July 11, 2011 The Guardian, entitled CIA Organised Fake Vaccination Drive to get Osama Bin Laden’s Family DNA, provides additional details.

“The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.

Relations between Washington and Islamabad, already severely strained by the Bin Laden operation, have deteriorated considerably since then. The doctor’s arrest has exacerbated these tensions. The US is understood to be concerned for the doctor’s safety, and is thought to have intervened on his behalf.

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.

So agents approached Afridi, the health official in charge of Khyber, part of the tribal area that runs along the Afghan border.

The doctor went to Abbottabad in March, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B. Bypassing the management of the Abbottabad health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers, who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Bin Laden. Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Bin Laden compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children.

Afridi had posters for the vaccination programme put up around Abbottabad, featuring a vaccine made by Amson, a medicine manufacturer based on the outskirts of Islamabad.

In March health workers administered the vaccine in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Abbottabad called Nawa Sher. The hepatitis B vaccine is usually given in three doses, the second a month after the first. But in April, instead of administering the second dose in Nawa Sher, the doctor returned to Abbottabad and moved the nurses on to Bilal Town, the suburb where Bin Laden lived.

It is not known exactly how the doctor hoped to get DNA from the vaccinations, although nurses could have been trained to withdraw some blood in the needle after administrating the drug.

“The whole thing was totally irregular,” said one Pakistani official. “Bilal Town is a well-to-do area. Why would you choose that place to give free vaccines? And what is the official surgeon of Khyber doing working in Abbottabad?”

A nurse known as Bakhto, whose full name is Mukhtar Bibi, managed to gain entry to the Bin Laden compound to administer the vaccines. According to several sources, the doctor, who waited outside, told her to take in a handbag that was fitted with an electronic device. It is not clear what the device was, or whether she left it behind. It is also not known whether the CIA managed to obtain any Bin Laden DNA, although one source suggested the operation did not succeed.

Mukhtar Bibi, who was unaware of the real purpose of the vaccination campaign, would not comment on the programme.

Pakistani intelligence became aware of the doctor’s activities during the investigation into the US raid in which Bin Laden was killed on the top floor of the Abbottabad house. Islamabad refused to comment officially on Afridi’s arrest, but one senior official said: “Wouldn’t any country detain people for working for a foreign spy service?”

The doctor is one of several people suspected of helping the CIA to have been arrested by the ISI, but he is thought to be the only one still in custody.

Pakistan is furious over being kept in the dark about the raid, and the US is angry that the Pakistani investigation appears more focused on finding out how the CIA was able to track down the al-Qaida leader than on how Bin Laden was able to live in Abbottabad for five years.

Over the weekend, relations were pummelled further when the US announced that it would cut $800m (£500m) worth of military aid as punishment for Pakistan’s perceived lack of co-operation in the anti-terror fight. William Daley, the White House chief of staff, went on US television on Sunday to say: “Obviously, there’s still a lot of pain that the political system in Pakistan is feeling by virtue of the raid that we did to get Osama bin Laden, something the president felt strongly about and we have no regrets over.”

The CIA refused to comment on the vaccination plot.”

National Public Radio’s Jason Beaubien filed the following for last night’s edition of All Things Considered:

“‘The CIA is not exclusively responsible for the problems we have in getting children vaccinated but it certainly didn’t make it anything easier,’ says Anthony Robbins, the co-editor of the Journal of Public Health Policy. Robbins wrote an editorial denouncing the CIA use of fake vaccination programs back in August of 2012. Even before bin Laden was killed in 2011, the Taliban had banned polio immunization in the parts of Pakistan it controls. The Taliban claimed the polio drops sterilize Pakistani children and vaccinators were American spies.

“The head of one large anti-polio campaign in Pakistan wasn’t happy to hear the CIA’s latest declaration. ‘I don’t think this statement is going to help in anyway,’ says Aziz Memon, who heads Rotary International’s polio eradication effort in Pakistan. He says Pakistanis were starting to forget about the controversy over the fake CIA vaccination campaign and now he expects the issue to blow up in the local media all over again.”

In January 2005, more than 100 of the world’s most renowned biomedical researchers got together to pay tribute to the 85-year-old Maurice Hilleman. When it was Hilleman’s turn to address the gathering, he alluded to them as his “peers in the world of science.” Referring to Hilleman’s gracious comment, science journalist Alan Dove wrote: “By any objective measure, a gathering of Maurice Hilleman’s scientific peers would not fill a telephone booth.” (1)

Hilleman truly was a giant in the history of virology. But, if you have only a vague idea of who Hilleman was or of his achievements, you are not alone. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was present at the gathering, noted: “Very few people, even in the scientific community, are even remotely aware of the scope of what Maurice has contributed….I recently asked my post-docs whether they knew who had developed the measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B and chickenpox vaccines. They had no idea,” Fauci said. “When I told them that it was Maurice Hilleman, they said, ‘Oh, you mean that grumpy guy who comes to all of the AIDS meetings?’”

Maurice R. Hilleman: The greatest vaccinologist.

Consider this. Hilleman developed nine of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended in current vaccine schedules. These are the vaccines for the measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and chickenpox viruses, and for meningococcal , pneumococcal, and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria. Moreover, he was the first to forecast the arrival of the 1957 Asian flu and, in response, led the development of a flu vaccine that may have saved hundreds of thousands or more lives worldwide (2). And, independently of Robert Huebner and Wallace Rowe, he discovered cold-producing adenoviruses, and developed an adenovirus vaccine. Overall, Hilleman invented nearly 40 vaccines. And, he was a discoverer of simian virus 40 (SV40). If the above accomplishments were not enough to ensure his fame, he also was the first researcher to purify interferon, and the first to demonstrate that its expression is induced by double-stranded RNA.

[Aside: I first became aware of Maurice Hilleman 44 years ago. It was in the context of his 1959 discovery of SV40, which I came across only because I was beginning my post-doctoral studies of the related murine polyomavirus. Bernice Eddy, at the U. S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), was probably the first to discover SV40, which she detected in early lots of the Salk polio vaccine (3). Hillman, then at Merck & Co, independently discovered the same virus in rhesus monkey kidney cell cultures, in which the polio vaccine was being produced. Hilleman gave SV40 its name. It was the 40th simian virus the Merck lab found in the monkey kidney cells. In 1961, both Eddy and Hilleman found that inoculating SV40 into hamsters causes tumors in the animals. Merck withdrew its polio vaccine from the market. But, by then, live SV40 had been unknowingly injected into hundreds of millions of people worldwide! More on this in a future posting.]

We begin our account of Hilleman’s achievements with his development of the mumps vaccine. In the days before the vaccine, mumps struck about 200,000 children in the United States, annually. Yet except in rare circumstances, the infection was mild, and was generally regarded as a childhood rite of passage. There is a sweetness to the story of the mumps vaccine that I hope you might enjoy.

The tale began at about 1:00 AM, on March 21, 1963, when 5-year-old Jeryl Lynn Hilleman ambled into her father’s bedroom complaining of a sore throat. Jeryl Lynn’s father felt his daughter’s swollen glands, and knew in a flash that it was mumps. And, while I suspect that many lay parents back in the day would also have recognized Jeryl Lynn’s symptoms, few would have done what her father did after first comforting his daughter. Although it was already past midnight, Maurice hopped into his car and drove the 20 minutes to his lab at Merck & Co. to pick up some cotton swabs and beef broth. Returning home, he then awakened Jeryl Lynn, gently swabbed her throat, and immersed the swabs in the nutrient broth. Next, he drove back to his lab and put the inoculated broth in a freezer.

Hilleman made the early A.M. dashes to his lab and back because he had to leave in the morning for a conference in South America, and his daughter’s infection might have cleared by the time he returned home from there. So, upon his return from South America, Hilleman, thawed the frozen sample from his daughter’s throat and inoculated it into chick embryos. Serial passage of the mumps virus in the chick embryos eventually generated attenuated mumps virus that in 1967 would serve as a live mumps vaccine.

The virus in the vaccine was dubbed the Jeryl Lynn strain, in honor of its source. Years later, an adult Jeryl Lynn Hilleman noted that her father had a need to be “of use to people, of use to humanity.” She added: “All I did was get sick at the right time, with the right virus, with the right father.”

We’ll have a bit more to say about the mumps vaccine shortly. But first, a few words about measles and rubella.

If mumps was not a major killer, measles certainly was. Before Hilleman and his colleagues introduced their measles vaccine (Rubeovax) in 1962, there were 7 to 8 million measles fatalities worldwide each year, and virtually all of the victims were children. Hilleman developed his attenuated measles vaccine from a measles strain isolated earlier by John Enders. Hilleman attenuated the Enders isolate by putting it through 80 serial passages in different cell types.

[Aside: In a previous posting, we noted that Enders, together with colleagues Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for growing poliovirus in non-nervous tissue (3). Apropos the current story, bear in mind that Salk and Sabin developed polio vaccines that have nearly rid the world of this once dread virus. Nevertheless, the Nobel award to Enders, Weller, and Robbins was the only Nobel award ever given in recognition of polio research!]

Rubeovax was somewhat tainted by its side effects; mainly fever and rash. While these reactions were successfully dealt with by combining Rubeovax with a dose of gamma globulin, in 1968 Hilleman’s group developed a new, more attenuated measles strain by passage of the Rubeovax virus 40 more times through animal tissues. Hilleman dubbed the new measles strain “Moraten,” for “More Attenuated Enders.” The new measles vaccine, Attenuvax, was administered without any need for gamma globulin.

Our chronicle continues with the rubella vaccine. Rubella poses its greatest danger to fetuses of non-immune pregnant woman, particularly during the first trimester of pregnancy. In up to 85% of these women, infection will result in a miscarriage or a baby born with severe congenital abnormalities. An outbreak of rubella began in Europe in the spring of 1963, and quickly spread worldwide. In the United States, the 1963 rubella outbreak resulted in the deaths of 11,000 fetuses, and an additional 20,000 others born with birth defects (e.g., deafness, heart disease, cataracts).

Hilleman had been working on a rubella vaccine at the time of the 1963 outbreak. But, he was persuaded to drop his own vaccine and, instead, refine a vaccine (based on a Division of Biologics Standards’ rubella strain) that was at the time too toxic to inoculate into people. By 1969 Hilleman was able to attenuate the DBS strain sufficiently for the vaccine to be approved by the FDA.

Next, and importantly, Hilleman combined the mumps, measles, and rubella vaccines into the single trivalent MMR vaccine, making vaccination and, hence, compliance vastly easier. Thus, MMR was a development that should have been well received by many small children and their mothers, as well as by public health officials.

In 1978 Hilleman found that another rubella vaccine was better than the one in the trivalent vaccine. Its designer, Stanley Plotkin (then at the Wistar Institute), was said to be speechless when asked by Hilleman if his (Plotkin’s) vaccine could be used in the MMR. Merck officials may also have been speechless, considering their loss in revenues. But for Hilleman, it was simply the correct thing to do.

Like Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin before him (3), Maurice Hilleman was never awarded a Nobel Prize. There is no obvious reason for the slight in any of these three instances. In Salk’s case, it may have been because Alfred Nobel, in his will, specified that the award for Physiology or Medicine shall be for a discovery per se; not for applied research, irrespective of its benefits to humanity. But, Max Theiler received the Nobel Prize for producing a yellow fever vaccine. What’s more, the Nobel committee seemed to equivocate regarding the discovery that might have been involved in that instance. Regardless, the Nobel award to Theiler was the only Nobel Prize ever awarded for a vaccine! [A more complete accounting of the development of Theiler’s yellow fever vaccine can be found in The Struggle Against Yellow Fever: Featuring Walter Reed and Max Theiler, now on the blog.]

Sabin had done basic research that perhaps merited a Nobel Prize (3). But, the Nobel committee may have felt uneasy about giving the award to Sabin, without also recognizing Salk. Or, perhaps the continual back-and-forth carping between supporters of Salk and Sabin may have reduced enthusiasm in Stockholm for both of them.

Yet by virtually any measure, Hilleman’s achievements vastly exceeded those of Salk, Sabin, Theiler, and just about everyone else. His basic interferon work alone should have earned him the Prize. Hilleman’s group demonstrated that certain nucleic acids stimulate interferon production in many types of cells, and detailed interferon’s ability to impede or kill many viruses, and correctly predicted its efficacy in the treatment of viral infections (e.g., hepatitis B and C), cancers (e.g., certain leukemias and lymphomas), and chronic diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis). What’s more, Hilleman developed procedures to mass-produce and purify interferon. And, regarding his unmatched achievements as a vaccinologist, he did more than merely emulate Pasteur’s procedures for developing attenuated viral vaccines. His hepatitis B vaccine was the first subunit vaccine produced in the United States. It was comprised of the hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), which Hilleman purified from the blood of individuals who tended to be infected with hepatitis B virus (e.g., IV drug abusers). Subsequently, to avoid the potential danger of using human blood products in the vaccine, Hilleman developed recombinant yeast cells that produced the HBsAg. And, Hilleman’s meningococcal vaccine was the first vaccine to be based on polysaccharides, rather than on a whole pathogen or its protein subunits.

So, why then was Hilleman bypassed by the Nobel committee? John E. Calfree, in The American, wrote: “As the 80-plus-year-old Hilleman approached death, Offit and other academic scientists lobbied the Nobel committee to award Hilleman the Nobel Prize for Medicine, based partly on his vaccine work and partly on his contributions to the basic science of interferons. The committee made clear that it was not going to award the prize to an industry scientist.” (4) [Paul Offit, referred to here, is the co-developer of the rotavirus vaccine, Rotateq, and a biographer of Hilleman.]

Calfree also notes that Hilleman’s tendency towards self effacement, and his absence from the academic and public spotlight, may also have worked against him. And, unlike Salk, whose name was closely linked to his polio vaccine (3), Hilleman’s name was never associated with any of his nearly forty vaccines. [Yet in the case of Jonas Salk, his public acclaim is generally believed to have hurt him in the eyes of his colleagues and of the Nobel committee.]

Considering the enormity of Hilleman’s contributions, his anonymity was really quite remarkable. As Calfree relates: “In one of the most striking of the dozens of anecdotes told by Offit, Hilleman’s death was announced to a meeting of prominent public health officials, epidemiologists, and clinicians gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Salk polio vaccine. Not one of them recognized Hilleman’s name!”

With Hilleman’s public anonymity in mind, we conclude our account with the following anecdote. In 1998, a Dr. Andrew Wakefield became a celebrity and hero in the eyes of the public. How this happened, and its consequences are troubling for several reasons, one of which is that it brought undeserved suffering to the self-effacing and benevolent Maurice Hilleman. The Wakefield incident merits, and will have a full-length blog posting of its own. But for now, in 1998 Wakefield authored a report in the prestigious British journal The Lancet, in which he claimed that the MMR vaccine might cause autism in children. The story had a bizarre series of twists and turns, with Wakefield and co-authors eventually issuing a retraction. The immediate cause of the retraction was the disclosure that Wakefield, on behalf of parents of autistic children, had accepted funding to investigate a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The purpose of the investigation was to determine whether a legal case against the vaccine manufacturer might have merit. In addition to the obvious conflict of interest, Wakefield’s paper had serious technical flaws as well. At any rate, a number of independent studies subsequently demonstrated that there is no causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. And, in 2010 Wakefield was barred by the British Medical Society from the practice of medicine. But the harm had been done. Hilleman had become the recipient of hate mail and death threats. And, more important to Hilleman I expect, many worried parents, even today, prevent their children from receiving the MMR vaccine (5). Ironically, the very success of the MMR vaccine enabled people to forget just how devastating measles and rubella could be. Maurice Hilleman succumbed to cancer on April 11, 2005.

1. Nature Medicine 11, S2 (2005)
2. Opening Pandora’s Box: Resurrecting the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Virus and Transmissible H5N1 Bird Flu On the blog.
3. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin: One of the Great Rivalries of Medical Science On the blog
4. Calfree, J.E., Medicine’s Miracle Man , The American, January 23, 2009
5. Reference 4 contains a somewhat similar tale, in which a 1992 article in Rolling Stone attributed the emergence of HIV to Hillary Koprowski’s polio vaccine. It created a sensation but, as might be expected, there was no evidence to support its premise.

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Welcome!

I am now a retired professor emeritus of Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts. Teaching virology has been a most rewarding aspect of my career. I especially enjoyed enlivening my lectures with a variety of relevant anecdotes.

Virology Textbook

Based on my experiences teaching virology for more than 35 years, I wrote Virology: Molecular Biology and Pathogenesis (ASM Press; 2010). For info on adopting or buying this textbook, please visit the publisher site: http://www.asmscience.org/content/book/10.1128/9781555814533